I'm Still Here

Hello, world of blog. I'm still here. I'm busy. I'm writing my dissertation and I don't have a lot of time for anything else. I'm happy, but feeling a lot of other emotions besides. (I have a wounded child to take care of. It's me.)

Gordie

Hello World,

Nothing really bad is happening in my life. Nothing really good, either. I'm just writing my PhD and that is the most important thing in the world, and it cannot be postponed any longer.

I love you all, each in your own way.

Highs, Crashes, and Withdrawals

We are wounded again in the same place. This doesn't turn us into victims. Rather, we are people in search of a transformation of the real.

The creative capacity to do this is extraordinary. Art isn't a surface activity. It comes from a deep place, and it meets the wound we each carry.

Although I knew I had plenty of personal failings, and that my mental states were unreliable, I also knew that I could do the work.

I have never taken antidepressants because I couldn't face the flatness.

I preferred the highs and the crashes, even though it meant the rages and the withdrawals, and anyway, I'd rather have my own suffering than someone else's solution.

JEANETTE WINTERSON
Wall Street Journal
October 17th, 2009
(read the full article)

Home Again

I've been away for a few days working, and I went to see my mum and took her to Blackpool Illuminations. She used to take me to see them when I was a child, so it was a nice treat for us both.

Now I'm back home and facing more work on my PhD (Be brave, Gordie...) The weather is starting to get chilly, and my cat Charlie is spending most of her time curled up beside me. I'm letting her sleep on my bed at night.

Here is a picture of Charlie when she was little.

Do your work, then step back

9

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.
Tao te Ching

Taking Tiger Mountain

We climbed and we climbed,
Oh, how we climbed
My, how we climbed
Over the stars to the top
Of Tiger Mountain
Forcing the lines through the snow.

Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
BRIAN ENO

Childlike Vision

"Down Cyprus Avenue
With the childlike vision
sweeping into view..."

I'm sorry I haven't written here very often recently. I've spent the last nine weeks concentrating on my PhD, as hard as I possibly can, in the hope that I would deliver something interesting for the start of term.

Writing a PhD is like writing the biggest essay ever (mine will come in at around 75,000 words) and there are only two things you need to know.

• First, it must be an original work;
• Second, it can't be an original work.

All PhD students inhabit this strange space, because we have to express our original ideas with references to lots of other people's work, in peer referenmced journals. Originality, in the form of a footnote.

I live through my words, and when I can't write (or talk) I feel like I'm in quite a traumatic place. And trying to express myself in the borrowed language of an academic tradition makes me feel like a character in a Kafka story. I understand now why deaf people feel liberated by having their own sign language, and diminished by mouthing a vocabulary they never heard spoken.

Then on Wednesday, I had a dream, that said my PhD only needs me to write 500 words.

This is, of course, not true. But I grasped what the dream meant was, I needed to write the first 500 words of my theory chapter, guiding the reader into my topic, like that bloke Dante meets at the start of the Divine Comedy [I think you mean the poet Virgil. Ed.]

I sifted through my notes and drafts, and wrote round, like a circle in a spiral, for a day, just thinking about the question of how I would talk to a reader who knew nothing about my research, and introduce them to six or seven authors and ten ot twelve key ideas, that I needed to explain my findings.

It came to 620 words, and I was starting to feel good. Then I wrote down my opening sentence.

This is the story of a market located in a city.

Then I crossed out "located" and wrote "embedded". (A bit more academic.)

Then I just crossed out "embedded" and didn't put anything.

This is the story of a market in a city.

Ten words, plain English, and it's all I need.

Because every arcane, and pretentious and high falutin' (and ultimately, academically respectable, which is what a PhD needs) concept that I need to talk about, and every author I need to cite, is an aspect of how people research markets, and the future of cities. So that's that.

Now, I have found my beginning, and I can walk to the end.

In my beginning is my end.
In my end is my beginning.